Events, dear boy, events.

The Coming Trump Majority

For assorted Establishment/elite commentators the fact that Trump is still President is as astonishing as it is annoying. The 25th Amendment, impeachment, Mueller or simply the complete breakdown of the Administration were all more likely than Trump having a week like he had last week. Trade deal, Kavanaugh confirmation, lowest unemployment in 60 or is it 70 years: this can’t be happening but it is.

There are less than 30 days until the mid-term elections for all of the House of Representatives and about a third of the Senate. The MSM, the Establishment commentators and “nice people” generally are talking up “the Blue Wave” where university educated suburban women will rise as one and toss the orange ogre onto the scrap heap of history where he so obviously belongs. Then, with a majority in the House of Representatives, the Democrats will be able to launch impeachment, conduct investigations and ensure the evil which is Trump will be sent to the Senate for a speedy impeachment trial and conviction. All will be right with the world.

The nice suburban ladies, the establishment media and right thinking people everywhere are, I am afraid, going to be in for a bit of a shock.

There is a chance that one or two Republican Senators may be defeated by Democrats, but there is a much better chance that those Republican Senate seats will hold and two or three sitting Democratic Senators will be defeated leaving the Senate at 53-56 Republicans and Trump entirely safe from conviction in a purely political impeachment.

The House is a tougher call. Hundreds of local races, lots of gerrymandering from both sides, polling all over the place with tiny sample sizes and often skewed questions. At the moment the Republicans hold 235 seats, the Democrats 193 seats and there are seven vacancies. That’s a margin of 43 seats so the “Blue Wave” has to take 22 to hold a tiny majority.

Conventional wisdom says that mid-term elections tend to result in a swing away from the sitting President’s party and that alone brings that 22 seat swing inside the realm of possibility. Add to that the President’s unpopularity…but wait, it turns out Trump is not particularly unpopular.

(And for my lefty friends yelling, “But it is Rasmussen.” I note that Rasmussen was a whole lot closer to predicting Trump’s win over Hilly than virtually any other poll.)

However, politics is more than just day to day polling results. It is about momentum, engagement, enthusiasm and the “mood” of the electorate.

Kavanaugh was a huge win for Trump because Trump got the job done and because the Democrats were revealled as a bitter, nasty, bunch of people who were willing to stoop to anything to cling to some sort of power. Even Republican “never Trumpers” were forced to admit that Trump was infinitely better than the Dianne Feinsteins of this world. The nomination and hearings also confirmed that the Hollywood/media/Democratic party nexus was shrill, irrational and really very unpleasant. And, as a bonus, the underhandedness of the Democrats and Trump’s willingness to stand by his nominee cemented the Republican Party behind Trump and behind itself.

Kavanaugh also underlined the collapse of the audience and moral authority of traditional media. There was not even a hint of objectivity in the coverage: Ford just had be telling the truth and if you questioned that you were enabling rape. Which would be fine coming from the mouths of activists, but coming from news anchors and commentators it made millions of essentially open-minded people question why they were watching “this crap”.

Trump understands the collapse of the MSM and uses it ruthlessly. He mocks the media, he tweets over their heads and, perhaps most importantly, he holds rally after rally.

There has never been a President who has been willing to do three to five public events a week, week after week, targetted at the battleground states. No, Trump is not going to do a rally in New York City or LA. Why would he? There are no seats to be won in either city. But he is willing to go out into the red states and rouse the base. He’s relentless. And at every rally he brings home his message of tax cuts, low unemployment, jobs, the return of manufacturing, fair trade, doing right by veterans, restoring America’s place in the world.

The Democrats have nothing to compare: though Bill and Hilly are, apparently, going on a stadium tour with the cheapest seats $60 and the better seats $600. Trump is practising retail politics on a wholesale level and he is simply getting better and better at it.

All which leads me to think there is a better than even chance that Trump will, at least, hold the House. But there is also a very good chance that the generic polling is wrong and that the Trump led Republicans are going to do a lot better than a hold.

The fact is that there are not actually all that many college educated, white, suburban women and those that there are will not vote as a solid block. The travesty of the Kavanaugh hearings and the sheer cynicism of the Democratic Senators – not to mention the cheesy grandstanding of Booker and Harris and the liar Blumenthal – will have alienated more than a few of the suburban ladies. Especially women who have sons.

There are also a lot of non-college educated, non-white, non-suburban people who are actually doing well with Trump. Black unemployment is at an all-time low, Hispanic unemployment is also at an all-time low. These groups historically are in the Democratic Party’s pocket but that can change. If it does change, even a little, there are dozens of Congressional seats which come into play.

Trump likes to win. He has solid political advisors and they like to win. It has occured to the Republican leadership that they do a lot better with Trump’s support than when they oppose him. It has occured to dozens of Republican candidates that Trump’s endorsement moves votes.

For a growing number of Americans, Trump’s policies are beginning to make sense. They have more money in their pocket and their kids have better prospects.

Walking into the mid-term polling station a lot of voters will ask themselves if they want to vote to derail the Trump train or if they want to climb on board.

You’d have to give me odds, but I would not be at all surprised to see the Republican majority in the House get up to 250 seats and, in the Senate, to 56. But, realistically, if that happens it will not be a Republican majority, it will be a Trump majority.

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9 thoughts on “The Coming Trump Majority”

I would have thought that while commentators are free to report on anything they choose, ultimately it is the voters who will decide. If you Google: Trump polls by State, I cant see any reason to get starry eyed about a win in the on-coming mid-terms for the GOP. I think from memory that at the beginning of 2017 Trump enjoyed much more popularity than he does today, but don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.

Sorry to rain on the parade but as I recall Rasmussen was actually the poll before the Presidential election that said more would vote for Trump than for Clinton and yet the total vote gave more than two million ahead for Clinton. The other main polls were closer. Remember it was the Electoral College that swung the vote.

On today’s figures from the combined polls even the electoral college would not be able to repeat this. But that last election was also at a time when Mr Trump was more popular than he is today. That is not to say the voters wont swing back for the next election. Just saying!

What your lefty friends will probably say about Rasmussen is: what matters in any poll is not the snapshot, but the trend. Rasmussen shows the same arc as pretty much every other poll (I like Gallup myself) – big drop in Trump’s popularity post election, stabilized for the last few months by a steady base that wavers by a couple of points per week, but is still much lower than his approvals when elected. You will recall that Trump lost the popular vote; with no electoral college magic in play, and a lower approval rating, your optimism may not be justified.

Mid terms are won by the base showing up, so who knows. I heard something recently that there were very few polls being done this cycle; I suspect the media polls aren’t getting done because of a lack of resources. So I suspect no one knows. The Kavanaugh appointment and circus is going to have an effect, we will see if the two sides cancel out.

We shall see. From here on in what is going to be interesting is what isn’t being said. There isn’t much about Russia right now, that whole thing seems to have died on the vine. Another week or so will show whether the Democrats are changing the subject when Kavanaugh is brought up or continuing what we have been hearing over the last couple weeks.

Not sure. I think it remains to be seen which side most successfully exploits the rage dividend, claiming virtue for their camp and deriding the authentic anger among the ___ forces of evil (insert your own demon here). My hope that the enraged Republicans who represent Trump’s unassailable 40% were going to vote anyway, but the complacent Democrats who stayed home for the last Presidential election will turn out. I guess we’ll know soon enough.

Serious question. How in the current media environment do you exploit the rage dividend? There isn’t a media you can use to present your message, or more accurately an audience for that media. I suspect that even the Kavanaugh circus isn’t broad knowledge outside of those who already are going to be voting.

The collapse of media influence is putting politics back to about where radio became common. Trump’s twitter feed is roughly equivalent to FDR’s radio show. And interestingly he is doing events, a roadshow political campaign that harkens back to a different time.

I’m not going to predict anything except that it will be very different from what that is expected.

I’m starting to realize that anyone who uses Twitter is a flawed source of information. It is informative no question, but it creates an impression of being more informed that you are. Both the recent Republican renaissance post Kavanaugh and the Democrat rage are evidenced on Twitter, so I trust neither.

I really don’t know, and there are very very few journalists on the ground to tell me.

I followed the Kavanaugh circus, not closely but am aware of the events that happened, and am one of a few especially north of the border.

If you turned on the news, which isn’t a habit like it was when I grew up, and listened, you would hear two stories. One is that the Republicans appointed a rapist to the Supreme Court. The other is that the Democrats threw around over the top false accusations in an attempt to derail the appointment.

Which is more believable?

This is why it is important to watch the Democrat messaging over the next week. I am betting that they are going to try to make the whole thing disappear.

The most interesting period in the circus came for me at the end of the first day. There seemed to be a kind of pause, where everyone was digesting what they had just seen, and the response from folks was, for a couple of hours, less mediated than usual.

Dr. Ford seemed to me to be a woman who HAD, in fact, been assaulted, and who was absolutely convinced she had been assaulted by Kavanaugh. She did not prove that by any legal standard, and I have to reserve judgement on the accuracy of her memory.

Justice Kavanaugh seemed to me to be a man who realized that he was being put in a horrible position by the Democrats. Again, I can’t speak to the honesty of his testimony. I will note that the behaviour of which he was accused, while odious, was not “rape”, and was unfortunately probably well within the bounds of “acceptable” in that period, within his circle.

In that short, still period before the Rage Generators on both sides roared back to life, even Trump seemed uncharacteristically subdued, and people were actually talking about some of the real questions:
– how accurate do we expect a woman’s recall of a trauma to be?
– does a thoughtless act by a young drunk actually condemn him for life? Can’t we change? Are we defined forever by our worst moment?

There are real, human, interesting conversations to be had about those those topics. They do not start with words like “Harpy”, though.

Agreed. I have been acquainted with these types of situations. They are ugly, the accusations are nasty and over the top, the responses as ugly. Often mixed with a history of emotional instability. There are no solutions except a terrible overreaction.

To throw this into a political arena is irresponsible. If this had been presented two or three months previously, looked at by the FBI who combs the background of these nominees, what would have happened? I understand that they got 1400 letters accusing Kavanaugh of rape. One wonders how he had time to be a judge.

I really don’t know what happened, if anything. It is impossible to know after 35 years.